Selected Reviews in Subject Groups:- Film, TV, DVDs, CDs, media critics | 'Holocaust' | Jews, Christians, Moslems | Race | Revisionism | Women | Bertrand Russell | Richard Dawkins | Martin Gardner
'The book that caused all the uproar!' says the dustjacket. Unlikely to be true as there was uproar in the late 40s
It's a very unsatisfactory book—not quite a whitewash, but close. Wood was in fact a P.R.O. [=Public Relations Officer] for the outfit, though he resigned, or so he said. Of the £50M or so [roughly equivalent to £half a billion now?] he makes no attempt to trace the cash—many people must have ended up with money stuck to their fingers.
This was a state enterprise, and must have been disillusioning for Labour Party voters. There's quite a bit of detail on (1) The invention or discovery of the scare—I doubt if the idea of a fat shortage was accurate, but I suppose it may have been. And the belief that peanuts were a good source of edible fat my have been correct. (2) The wastefulness. For example railways were not properly planned, but nonetheless begun. There was absurd military secrecy on the part of military types left over from the war. There were elaborate pension funds from the start!
Probably the whole thing was another Anglo-Jewish fraud, no doubt involving paper money (at interest) and asset transfers. For similar activities in the Far East, you might read this piece by Hexzane527 on the 'British Empire'.
On absence of investigations: Wood says somewhere he hopes there will be no investigation. Seems typical of 1945ish -- it's simply assumed people did things for the best without any inquiry. As far as I knw this was was granted.
There have been many misconceived plans about plants. One was a royal plan to plant mulberry trees in huge numbers for silkworms, i.e. larvae of silkworm moths, which spin cocoons. Unfortunately the royal personage selected black mulberry, not white—or the other way round?—which wasn't the right foodplant, the caterpillars preferring to die than eat.
The Gambia egg scheme 'vied with groundnuts in the late 1940s as grumbling blocks for the Labour Government.' says Lawrence D Hills in a book on comfrey.
The whole thing can be read as a scheme overfull of chiefs and generals. Many men with impressive titles, but with no idea of rainfall, tractor parts, water supplies, harbour depths, equipment needed to remove plants without too much mess, costs, educating people to keep things maintained, railways, tsetse flies, soil types, housing which could be supplied, local customs like using pegs in witchcraft etc...
... and/or as post war phenomenon probably resembling wartime, with generals and politicians mostly out of their depth and passing the buck and fooling with subordinates—issuing unfollowable orders, making do with supplies craftily produced in poor ways, hiring people to make misleading announcements, or imposing structures with quasi purposes—think of post war Germany with its armies of occupation.
... and/or as reaction to Labour Govt, with equipment being second rate and presumably not properly checked, as by an incompetent surveyor—there seem to have been no penalties.
Photo shows Wood, a pipe-smoking Australian who did Modern Greats at Balliol. He 'frankly' states 'the author knows nothing of Africa'. There are fifteen photos distributed through the book. And it is indexed.
-'.. those who saw it.. may wonder if it really happened.. that a timber mill was sited before anyone had counted the trees for the wood; that a pipeline costing £500,000 or more was built to take fuel, at a huge operating expense, to tanks set miles from anywhere in the African bush; that a railway was begun without anyone knowing exactly where it was going to in the end; ..'
In 1948 they seem to have had a crop.
Wood's style is wordy & he begins with what he studied: Malthus and Marx, moving on to officials, bankers, scientists.. Plenty of his own opinion.
John Strachey, Marxist, well-known at the time, had 'spelling would have disgraced a child of ten'—note of concealment
p. 21: 1832 Livingstone and Zanzibar—it stank, said Livingstone
p. 29: '.. It is only recently, since .. dietary experts and .. rations.. that we have learnt the importance of fats and edible oils. Their exact significance is still not properly understood: but it is known that the human body cannot get on without them. The Arctic explorer Stefansson found that he could live on a diet consisting of nothing but meat, provided he ate plenty of fat; ... Apparently, too, one of the functions of fats is to act as a protective food for the nerves: the absence of fat leads to strain and irritation.' [sic]
p. 46: '... immediate post-war days, when the bulldozer still had the glamour of its wartime exploits. You could do anything with fleets of bulldozers, bashing down bush, building roads, pushing aside all obstacles. It was forgotten that in war-time nobody need bother about the economics of it (a tractor costs about a shilling a minute to run): ... and was likely to be an extravagant way of setting about things in Africa, with its low wages. ...'
pp. 70-75: the Wagogo— interesting account of bare economics and physics plus topping of superstitions
Agriculture of millet & groundnuts—the hoe being the only agricultural implement; and cattle; murder and theft punished by killing, fierce anger by threat to possessions or cattle. Occasional runaway slaves. 70-80% death before first year—some due to infanticide of twins, preemies, upper teeth first, unsuitable newborn feeds. And dowry being payment for loss of women's very hard work. Plus circumcision, medicine men, sacrifices, god or sky spirit.
p. 204: '.. one of the biggest problems to be faced in East Africa is the grip of the Indian trading class...'. Wood says in a footnote: 'I trust no one will read into this passage and prejudice against Indians as such. The question of race only enters into it so far as the natural economic tendency to quasi-monopoly is reinforced by common racial ties.'